Jayne Cobb
Life on the rim calls for some serious muscle, and if you pay him enough, Jayne Cobb is your man. A big, gruff, and untrustworthy mercenary with an affinity for violence and the weapons that cause it, Jayne is a valuable part of the crew -- so long as he gets paid. There's more to him than that -- Jayne has a keen-if-caustic sense of humor, strong familial ties, and maybe even feelings for the others, deep down -- but he'd deny it and then hit you for suggesting it. - From The Official Serenity Website Behind the Scenes Jane is portrayed by actor Adam Baldwin in the television series Firefly and the motion picture Serenity. Background Jayne is a mercenary who did not fight on either side in the Unification War. He met up with former Independence fighters Malcolm Reynolds and Zoë when his gang tried to rob them. Mal offered him a larger share of heists and his own bunk, and so Jayne shot one of his companions and joined up with Mal instead. Jayne is good in a fight, and reacts before he thinks on many occasions. Although he often appears to be somewhat stupid, he has his own peculiar wit. He has played successful jokes on the more intellectual Simon Tam (for instance, tricking Simon, who harbors an excessive fear of the vacuum of space, into putting on a spacesuit to board a pressurized ship in "Bushwhacked"). He's also credited for the witty, fan-favorite line, "I'll be in my bunk,". Jayne also has a keen sense of danger and is often the first to raise an accurate warning about impending peril (also in "Bushwhacked"). Although often represented as a strict mercenary, Jayne has his own code of honor. He is loyal to his employer as long as he is being paid well. When he has not acted up to his code of honor, he has worked to atone for it, for instance by buying a crate of fresh apples and sharing it with the crew of the ship for what he did in "Ariel". Jayne also demonstrates unexpected sentimentality in "The Message", when it is revealed that he sends some of the money earned by his mercenary activities home to his mother. In the same episode, he proudly sports a ridiculous orange knit cap with earflaps, simply because his mother made it for him (Wash: "A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything."). Jayne keeps a large arsenal in his bunk on Serenity. He has named his favorite and most powerful gun (a "Callahan full-bore auto lock with customized trigger double cartridge thorough gauge") Vera. He acquired it after killing the previous owner, an assassin trying to kill him. Jayne frequently carries a handgun based on a LeMat Percussion Revolver, and in the movie Serenity, carries a mini-gun named Lux, which is a reference to the internet handle of one of the shows dedicated fans, LuxLucre. Jayne doesn't have many fears, but he has shown fear at anything to do with Reavers, a subpopulation of feral humans. He is convinced that fugitives Simon and his sister River Tam will bring the Alliance down on them, and this concern fuels his dislike of the Tams. Jayne has also demonstrated fear of dying in what he considers an unmanly manner, notably being "spaced". Jayne is regarded as something of a Robin Hood-like folk hero by the people of Canton on Higgin's Moon ("Jaynestown"). They have erected a statue of him in the center of the town and sing a song dedicated to "the hero of Canton, the man they call Jayne" ("The Ballad of Jayne Cobb") in which they tell how "he robbed from the rich and he gave to the poor". The true story is, however, less heroic. Jayne and his then-partner Stitch Hessian did indeed steal from Magistrate Higgins and drop the money on the town, but this was only because during his escape, Jayne's ship was attacked and damaged and he needed to lose a lot of weight from the ship just to keep it flying. Jayne dumped the money in desperation, but only after having already thrown out his unfortunate partner. It was in this episode that he let his emotional walls down the most, becoming deeply disturbed when the townspeople continued to idolize him after learning the truth. Category: Characters